Double brood

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Red Bee

House Bee
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I've just read Poly hives excellent sticky. I'd like to have a go at Q rearing in the coming season. I've read of double brood with two supers in between used for Q rearing. Is there any advantage/disadvantage in this method. Sounds a good way of doing it to me. Keeping it in a Q + colony stretched out though.

Thanks
 
Please read again as although it started as a double brood box it then was split. It was split to create the crowding required to achieve good acceptance rates. Also to provide enough material to set up at least 6 nucs from.

I used a double brood box on purpose to drive home just how strong the colony needs to be.

PH
 
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2+2 box hive is strong enough to rear fat queens. Are they good, it depends on their genetic backround "from good family".
 
I've read of double brood with two supers in between used for Q rearing.

You can raise a few queen cells this way but I wouldn't recommend it.

If you confine the queen in one brood box under a QX and ensure there are eggs in the other one, the bees will raise queen cells in the brood box where there is no queen. This is because the supers separate the bees so much they think they are queenless. The danger is the bees might choose a larva which is too old and the resulting queens will be inferior. You could get around this if you could somehow arrange it so they only had eggs or larva under 24 hours old to play with. (Grafting?) However, once they have started their queen cells you should swap the supers and brood box around so the brood box with the cells is next to the QX. The bees will continue to finish the queen cells in what is now a queenright colony and the queens might be OK. If you don't swap the supers and brood box arond the bees will complete the queen cells under an emergency impulse and they tend not to fed as well like this.

To get the best queens you need brood boxes stuffed with well fed young nurse bees which is why methods such as the one PH describes have manipulations to ensure there are lots of bees around the queen cells.
 
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When has 3 hives I do not recommend to raise own queens. When rearing few queens the yield will probably slow down by disturbance. Next stage is that mating nucs need bees. They are again taken from foragers.

At least if you do like a professional queen rearer - which make no sence, you surelu loose that hive's honey yield. The price of queens will be huge.

OK, all goes fine and you get 15 fine queens. They need nucs and lot of bees. So you sacrifice your all 3 hives to make 15 new nucs.

So you are a big beekeeper. You get 1000 kg honey and you sell them. Before that yuo must get 75 box and 750 frames into hives.
 
Before that yuo must get 75 box and 750 frames into hives.

Yep thats the killer.

Ive still got 400+ frames to go. Extreme boredom.:smash::beatdeadhorse5:
 
Red Bee,

I think you are looking at spliting your hives, not out-and-out queen rearing. I'm guessing here that you are just in your second season at present?

Queen rearing is when you set about raising several queens in a batch and likely followed by more batches. With just three colonies, you have little chance of doing that. Finman is right in what he says. Your 15 queens ('rearing') would be costing you, in all your potential honey crop, which from 3 colonies can be considerable.

Even if only 75kgs (and could be much more) that may raise over three hundred pounds worth of honey to help build/buy some extra kit. Your 15 queens may only make a dozen going into winter, what with the odd queens being just poor, of nasty temperament, weak colonies - leading to losses to wasps and robbing. With no backup from which to draw reinforcements later in the year, you actually run the risk of making very little progress in a bad season. That can be very disheartening, even more so if there is a large sugar bill and no honey either!

Much better to do as you suggested and settle for strong splits by artificial swarming, (with a few extra splits as you might be able to manage), rather than trying queen rearing. When you get to double your hive count, you might be having a tentative start to queen rearing; ten colonies would be better.

The 75 boxes and 750 frames is just being a bit OTT. They would not all be needed next year - but likely for the following, though!

Regards, RAB
 
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If you have next summer those 3 hives in normal condition. Propably one day you see queen cells in the hive when it is going to swarm. Only efficient way to save yoyr bees is to do a false swarm.
In this case you maket 2 hives: a laying queen in the foundation hive and old frames + queen cells.
You may do in this case 2 nucs and give the emerged queen to the nucs. If you want honey the splitted hive should be joined again to get home bees and foragers into balance.

So, I bet that you get queen cells in natural way that you may enjoy about new queens how they start their life.
 
Quote from Poly Hives sticky

Easy Queen rearing
How to raise a few queens.

Considered by many to be very difficult and in the realms of the expert beekeeper the raising of queens is in fact not that tricky.

There are many many ways of doing all that follows but I am going to suggest as simple a way as I can.

One matter that cannot be over looked is selection and redundancy. If you are looking for say four queens, then I would suggest you try at least 6 to allow for failure.

To achieve that 6, I am going to suggest you aim at offering the starter unit 18.

From this you can see that one has to accept losses in this process.

With your cells now sealed, the starter box can be used to provide sealed brood to your mating nucs.



So you could raise queens with 1 hive!!!
 
And another thing! Lol

I never asked if I could raise queens with three hives!!!
 

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